let's say rights are for all the basics. what do you guys see about freedom? is it something you know enough to write a poem about?

I wouldn't be able to write a poem even if I could adequately express freedom, the problem with the word freedom is everybody knows what it should be but when it comes to putting this in practice some people will benefit from this exercise and therefore other people will lose freedom.

__________________If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas-George Bernard Shaw

Or, free expression, without the threat of force. Force and coercion are the antithesis.

So Galileo can say the earth isn't the centre of the universe, or whatever he said, without being incarcerated.

That's basically it. But aside from a principle upheld by society, you'd probably then want to look at the constraints of culture and whether they are conducive towards or actually inhibit freedoms -- y'know if you wanna get technical and philosophic.

Part of growing up is certainly to diminish your own freedoms purposefully. Discipline and deferred gratification for example are self imposed constraints upon freedoms which don't really occur to a child. I think that might be what Wagner is getting at.

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I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm trying to kill kids.

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Or, free expression, without the threat of force. Force and coercion are the antithesis.

So Galileo can say the earth isn't the centre of the universe, or whatever he said, without being incarcerated.

That's basically it. But aside from a principle upheld by society, you'd probably then want to look at the constraints of culture and whether they are conducive towards or actually inhibit freedoms -- y'know if you wanna get technical and philosophic.

Part of growing up is certainly to diminish your own freedoms purposefully. Discipline and deferred gratification for example are self imposed constraints upon freedoms which don't really occur to a child. I think that might be what Wagner is getting at.

I tend to think we have only the illusion of freedom. We are ultimately a set of genes (unchosen by us) acted upon by experience. When we're babies we don't choose what experiences we will be imprinted by. Our primary caregivers do that. So the genes and experiences that culminate in say a four-year-old-you are all unchosen. You have to ask, how is it that you can make a "free" choice independant of your genetic predisposition and experiential conditioning?

By the time you're old enough to make your first "free choice" you've been conditioned to choose a certain way, and even if you say to yourself: "I feel like choosing X, but to be different I'll go with Y", it was your conditioning that caused you to change your mind - something in your past that taught you to question your first inclination and go for something else. You can never really make a free choice.

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